The perils of plagiarism sink a Harvard president
I’ve been thinking about the recent plagiarism accusations directed against Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, a school that considers itself the epitome of academic excellence. The charges led to Gay’s resignation this past Tuesday.
Gay, who became president last July, was first investigated in October after The New York Post asked for comment on allegations of improper citations. Harvard promised to investigate the matter. After the university found “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” Gay reportedly made “corrections” to her dissertation.
It seems Gay even plagiarized portions of the acknowledgements in her dissertation. The Harvard Corp., however, insisted the new president’s actions did not rise to the level of “research misconduct.”
If the rhetoric coming out of Harvard sounded a tad defensive, I think you’re right. The euphemisms themselves were troubling: “research misconduct” rather than “plagiarism,” for example. Many students, faculty and alumni expressed their support, and some even advanced the argument that at least Gay did not falsify data. That’s a pretty meager defense.
The academic community regards stealing someone’s ideas without attribution as a serious matter — as it should. That’s why the scholarship we produce contains copious footnotes. I always consider footnotes the essential plumbing of scholarship; they provide attribution for ideas, and they also function as a trail of breadcrumbs so that both the author herself as well as other scholars can trace the genealogy of those ideas.
Although Gay had support at Harvard, a group of students and alumni, according to The New York Times, called for her dismissal or her resignation. “It is not appropriate for Claudine Gay to serve as President of Harvard,” the letter read in part, “as she does not represent our collective values or the Harvard that we have come to know.”
That seems to be the most telling argument in this case. How can the president of an august educational institution represent the “collective values” of scholarly integrity when she stands accused of plagiarism?
Put another way, imagine the first student brought before a disciplinary panel at Harvard on charges of plagiarism. It’s not difficult to predict the defense: “The university president got away with it, why shouldn’t I?”
This is a troubling case. Complicating matters even further, the charges originated with a far-right ideologue and were then published in The New York Post, which has been criticized of late for sensationalism and right-wing bias. It’s owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns Fox News.
Still, further inquiry revealed at least 40 instances of missing or improper citations in the 11 articles Gay submitted for tenure at Harvard.
Wait! What? Harvard tenured someone in the social sciences with no book and only 11 scholarly articles — more than half of which apparently were flawed? Plagiarism is bad enough, but an equally vexing question is how Gay secured tenure at a place like Harvard with such a sparse record of publication.
Having been tenured at two Ivy League schools (Columbia and Dartmouth), I believe I bring some credibility to this discussion. I long ago lost track of how many tenure evaluations I’ve done over the years — dozens, to be sure, perhaps over a hundred — and I’ve served on many tenure and promotion committees at various institutions, including Harvard.
If a tenure dossier in the humanities or social sciences came to me with no book and 11 articles, my eyebrows would begin twitching. At the very least, I’d subject the articles to even greater scrutiny. No such scrutiny at Harvard, apparently, and so the university found itself in a real mess of its own making.
Harvard needs to ask some searching questions about its standards for tenure.
Randall Balmer is the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College.